Little Tiny Pieces
by HarvestMoonRacoon
Summary: Team Gai is broken in heart, mind, and body, and Tenten is dealing with the aftermath. Unfortunately, she's just as crazy as the rest of them. Oneshot. NejiTen, slight LeeTen, and if you're a pervert, GaiTen.


**Author's Note: It's been a long time since I wrote you all any good Team Gai angst, hasn't it? Consider this story an apology for all those months you had to wait, my loyal readers. My profuse apologies, but life has been rather crazed on this side of the internet. Alright. I hope you all enjoy this, and once more, I'm sorry for taking so long to put this up. I just wrote it a few minutes ago, so I hope it's to your standards.**

**AND YES, I AM WORKING ON THE 30 WAYS! Is it just me, or is email thing spazzing? I haven't gotten any Review Alerts for days.. **

It was the first repetition of many, she knew. But somehow, the whole idea didn't fit up in her head.

Somehow, it was still easier to wake up and in the haze of morning remembrances to think that she was still young, spunky and sarcastic, twirling kunai on her fingers and twisting her downy hair in knots around her hand. It was much easier to remember back to the days when she woke and drew her hair back with ribbons. When she openly admired her almond eyes and impish features in the mirror, before she would stroll outside to the Training ground, gazing at the dew-sprung grass and reluctant sun.

Those were days of simplicity. Gai-sensei was right about the fleeting Summers Of Youth. Like the honey-suckle moments of an early spring, they depart so quickly that we're left wondering what hit us when the rug gets pulled out from under our feet. Just like the hope of a Spring of new life cruelly cut short by a late, unexpected whiteout of thin, crusted snow.

She wishes she could flee back to the Summers of her Youth, if only for a day or two. No, that wouldn't do. If she had the choice, she would stay forever in the sunny time when she actually worried about what Neji thought of her appearance, and Lee could be shaken awake with her hands. When Gai's ridiculous behavior was an embarrassment, not a reprieve. When missions were new and exciting, and every day the sun was crazy bright with promise through the shimmering eyes of a young girl.

Tenten isn't a young girl anymore.

She wonders when she grew up so fast.

Now, when she wakes from the fitful string of nightmares, her once-clean apartment stares stodgily back at her, the walls dingy with dust. Even though it's still the same celestial body that shone every morning when the whole world was right, the sun seems dim and begrimed, almost reluctant to cast it's light onto a nation called Konohagakure.

Maybe it's afraid it'll expose Konoha's dirty little secrets.

She still meets her team every day, but it's far from their teenage years when they would meet on a sun-kissed field and spar, Neji deflecting every kunai and shruiken she threw with every repetitive training skirmish.

Nowadays, she has to walk some time to see Lee. The nurses know her by name, and they hardly glance at her when she strides purposefully down the white hallways of Konohagakure Hospital.

He's usually sitting at a table with something in front of his face. A puzzle. A handful of wooden blocks. A book of words he can't recognize. But try as he might, he can only push the puzzle pieces across the pine-colored table with his fingers, never connecting them to each other. The same with the blocks. Always scooting the wood across the shining plastic tabletop, but never placing one atop the other to build a skyscraper that touched the clouds. Through his hollow eyes, Lee can only see the darkness of the dingy alley and the pattern of concrete underneath his face as his body jerks and arcs against his will.

Tenten kisses him on the forehead, and sits down beside him. Reaching for his frozen hands, (Lee's hands are always as cold as a biting breath of Winter wind.) she gently clasps the clammy skin between her slender, calloused fingers and talks to him. Somedays, Lee almost seems like himself, the same one that used to run about in green tights and look up to his Gai-sensei. Their Gai-sensei.

And somedays, he's worse. The obsessive disorder with washing his hands begins again, and when Tenten holds his hand, there are gloves with ointment in them around his once-bandaged fingers. Somedays, he's strapped to his bed with leather ties, thrashing and screaming and trying to bend in a way that the ropes won't allow. It's really a simple thing that he wants, but for some reason, Tenten is always responsible for it. She carefully unlaces the bondage (For bondage it is. Lee knows more than anybody.) around her former teammate's wrists, and cradles him to her chest as he curls his legs around his unprotected backside and cries into her bosom, trying to drag her onto the gurney with him for protection against the phantom hands and ravaging effects of obsessive compulsive disorder. Somedays he is empathetic, asking how her life is. She lies and tells him fine. But one thing that is the same every day is the hollow, bleak light that used to be a soul afire with passion.

But madness and four men in a dark alley have stolen his fire away. Lee isn't Lee any more. The Lee Tenten knows is still bounding forever in time in the last few seconds before the gang dragged him into the rut between the two run-down buildings and took away his virginity and his sanity.

By the time she kisses him again on the forehead to leave, Lee is a numb, stiff body in a hospital gown staring at his feet as though she's not really there any more. And though the nurses say he asks everyday when "Tenten-Chan" is coming to see him, she knows that no matter how many times she visits, there will always be one person that he wants to see more than anyone.

Sometimes, Tenten is angry at Gai-sensei for dying. Lee needs him even more than he did all of those years ago. Tenten needs him to be the adult in the situation, and to cup her face in his hands and kiss her in a fatherly gesture where she kisses Lee. She would give anything to hear his big, booming voice greeting her on those glowing training fields.

And so, she leaves Lee too soon, promising as she pulls his resisting body into her lap that she'll be there tomorrow to see him. Lee's become so thin since he was admitted, she always recalls, remembering how heavy he was when she shook him awake in their first Chuunin exam, and when she carried his twitching and trembling body to the hospital that night, gagging on the smell of cum and blood that covered him from head to toe.

Lee will never go home. He will spend the rest of his life in a hoar-colored caricature of life as he once knew it. His madness claims him a place to hide from the woes of the Shinobi world.

And Tenten is poisonously jealous of that.

She would gladly join Lee as a decorated emergency, and have the self-inflicted bruises and contusions to remind her what she did when she was awake, and have the cameras catching them causing twin commotions on their gurneys. She sees how Lee suffers, but he's ignorant of the horror that goes on outside the walls of the sterile hospital walls he lives behind.

Lee hasn't even been outside in years. He doesn't know what goes on every day in her's and Neji's life.

But, than again, she can't blame him for it. Lee is, after all, insane. She would kill the men who stripped Lee of his innocence and left behind this shriveled shadow of his once happy self, but than, she would beg them to do the same to her. She would rather live within the confinement of her own mind than face the world outside the automatic hospital doors.

A dingy sky, with storm clouds crouching on the horizon meet her when she steps out the door, almost as if they wait for her to show her face so that their dark edges can mock her once fine face.

It's to see Gai-sensei.

She spends at least a minute at the memorial stone, her fingers languidly curled to the scratched lettering that spells "Maito Gai" in the frozen granite. She never stays long, sometimes departing after only a few seconds. But Gai is part of her team, in that walk cycle replaying in her mind of a life she once had, and he deserves to be visited, too.

And besides, he helps her stall before she has to meet Neji.

She thinks she's seen enough of those hollow stares to last her a lifetime, but she is always surprised to see Neji's pale eyes full and devoid of passion at the same time. He sits on his bandaged hands on the side of his lumpy bed, staring at the floor and wondering what's become of the life he once lived, and who replaced it with this sham. The chocolate-haired man always hears Tenten's feet lightly tacking down the hallway, but he does not run to meet her. He simply sits, staring at her as she enters the room.

It all depends on how they're both feeling. Sometimes they sit beside each other, daring not touch and too numb to cry for the teammates and friends and lovers they've lost. And sometimes they kiss in despair, hands roving to forbidden areas of each other's bodies in desperate hope of some sort of ecstasy, some kind of way out of here. They moan with passion, and at the same time pleas for reprieve of the terrible burdens they carry on their spine-splinter backs.

They never discuss Gai-sensei. In a twisted sense, it's respecting their sensei as they never did when he was alive.

Funny how you don't know what you have until it's taken away.

Finally, she leaves her teammate, who was injured to the brink of death on a mission when they were sixteen. Neji will never fight again, which Tenten won't admit she's glad to know. She's always careful when he's on top of her to be wary of the legs that will never carry him through a jungle of tree branches at her side, or the arms that will never spin to protect him in the force field of a Kaiten from her weaponry. Neji is broken, but not like Lee. Neji is fragmented of heart and body, while Lee is broken of mind. Neji will never recover from the loss of his Shinobi strength, just as Lee will never recover from his forced sex. Neji will forever be making her temperature spike with the ecstasy of their temporary escape, knees bunching into the never-made bed beneath them, and Lee will forever writhe under the imaginary hands that never leave him, no matter how many years have passed since that night.

It really sucks having damaged teammates, because Tenten is the only one to be responsible for them.

Naruto visits Lee diligently, but Sakura seems to all have forgotten about the broken boy who used to love her, before he learned in cold deflowering what love wasn't. Tenten somedays wants to just cut Sakura's modly-godly medic-nin head off with the knives she seems to be so fluent in using. The pink-haired woman who can hardly remember Lee's name could be helping him, helping Tenten, helping Neji. But she's not. And the Hyuugas have all but disowned Neji, allowing him his retreat in the dark, forgotten corner of their complex, treating him as no more than a ghost roaming their hallways in the shadow-filled decadence of a year-round Halloween. The Hyuuga complex is haunted, by a pale scarecrow of what was once the prodigy of a generation of Genin. No one will visit his lonely room, besides her, because no one remembers Neji. Gone is the uppity angst child, and in his place the shell of his shriveled, quivering half-stripped, half-hidden emotions and despair at what he no longer is.

Tenten resigns herself to the fact that she alone is the caretaker of the boys she once called teammates. Well, they're not really boys anymore. They're men, now, by experience, age, and life.

But like she said, sometimes it's easier to think that they're all Genin on a summery field, with Gai-sensei raving about their skills as he poses, seated atop his turtle summon with Lee's adoring eyes glued to him with life, instead of the empty death they possess now.

And so, Tenten returns home to her lonely, dark apartment. The walls whisper with age and hiss her crimes in low, venomous mocking of her ability to do nothing to help her teammates. They speak to her as she prepares herself a meager meal for herself and her teammates, which she places on her small table where once, as children innocent and ignorant, ate sandwiches and joked together, laughing at each other's jokes and discussing training and Chuunin exams and Gai-sensei and so many things Tenten wants to forget and remember at the same time.

Three bowls of food find their place on either side of the table as she solemnly chews. One for Neji, one for Lee, and one for Gai-sensei, even though they aren't able to be there. Tenten imagines they want to be with her in spirit, even though Neji's is in pieces, Gai's is somewhere she can't find, and Lee doesn't know enough to remember what anything beside being frightened is.

Four bowls join the pile of dishes Tenten promises to clean someday, the porcelain clattering above the roar of the walls. They're screaming, now. Screaming at her uselessness, her inability to help those she loves most. Screaming at her, screaming at her, screaming at her through all hours of the day and night-

And so, Tenten grits her teeth and takes a magenta red crayon to the cream-colored paint, to silence the voices.

She draws Lee, bounding and dancing with his hands to the heavens, reaching for the stars like he always did, a serene smile of promise on his lips, outlined in the dark red Crayola. She draws Gai-sensei upon Ninkdaime, proclaiming that he has the single most talented squad in the history of ninja kind. And she draws Neji, arms crossed in a way that impended that he was trying to keep from smiling himself, because those were happy days, when being a ninja was fun, and not about seduction missions and wars.

She slides back on the hard wood floor, panting, and smiles at her work, magenta scars like hair-line fractures creating a picture of the life she had and wants back.

And than, she stabs at the faces with her crayon until the drawing stick is nothing but crumbled wax in her hand, and screams as she pounds the faces with her fists, the walls reverberating with her weakened slaps and scratches at the picture until blood is smeared across her canvas, over the mess of dark magenta.

And than Tenten allows herself to cry over the accusations that the voices in her head shriek in macabre strings of gory descriptions of what she could have prevented. It's useless to resist the words. She's heard them over and over so many times that she will never forget what she goes to sleep every night thinking.

And she wishes that Neji or Lee would come and cradle her until she fell asleep, and drifted away to the happy Summers of their Youth, when the world was right, and Tenten had no shattered lives to uphold when she could barely keep her own up. She wishes that Gai were alive, and she wishes that when Neji touched her, it meant anything. And she wishes most all that she weren't even alive to remember the life she once lived, or the life she lives now.

Because as shattered of mind and spirit as her team is, she's the one that's most broken.

**A/N: I'm nervous, everyone. Review, or I'll take even longer to write the new "30 Ways"...**


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